Electrical connectors operate to provide an electrical pathway or junction, and in so doing provide a mechanical connection between wires, circuit boards, components or other current carrying devices. Headers are examples of connectors that provide an electrical junction between two circuit bards (“board-to-board”) or between a cable assembly and a circuit board (“wire-to-board”), although, as is typically understood, a “board” may be an electrical component, circuit block or other device, and need not necessarily be a printed circuit board. In a typical header, a number of pins are inserted through a housing so that a portion of the pin remains extended from each side of the housing. The pins are made of an electrically conductive material and the housing is made of a dielectric material. The pins are usually retained within the housing by a press fit or similar mechanical connection, such as tabs or ears that engage the dielectric material of the housing primarily by friction.
Currently, the tabs that retain connector pins lack positional support in one plane. In other words, with conventional pin retention features, there is one direction in which there is little support resulting in possible true positional errors. Moreover, in currently available designs the retention forces required in particular applications are often difficult to maintain.
There exists, therefore, a need to provide improvements to the design of header pins, however, any improvements in the shortcomings noted above must be made in a manner in which the resulting design is capable of being manufactured in high volumes at high speeds to meet the demands of the electronics industry. For example, pressing and shaping pin stock into tabs using conventional presses has a limited number of directional and dimensional features that can be efficiently produced.
Certain prior art pins use a “star” feature and have four interference features arrayed around the body of a header pin. The pin necessarily has a thick cross-section to accommodate the four interference features. However, localizing the interference features also localizes the stresses in the assembly and thus increases the chances of localized cracking, particularly in the type of brass typically used for connector pins, which is relatively hard and non-malleable. Furthermore, the “star” feature design suffers in positional stability from not having its ears/tabs displaced from one another longitudinally.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide connector pins that improve the retention and positional accuracy of the header, while reducing or eliminating stress concentrations. It would be further desirable to provide a design for such header pins that can be manufactured using conventional production equipment so that large quantities of such pins can be produced economically.